Overall trend to Virginia schools seems to be down. Year to year, there are probably peer influences. People apply and accept based on where other influencers apply and accept. |
UIUC is also Coalition. Significant # of TJ enrollments. My kid says the Coalition App was a little more work but no biggie - I realize you have a rising senior and haven't gone through the process - don't worry, TJ handles Coalition apps well. In fact, TJ sent out everything (Common and Coalition) on time with no issues. |
Perhaps, but the 59% reduction in applicants to one of the state's largest universities with the largest and most comprehensive engineering school that tries to position itself as the STEM option and instrumental in landing Amazon (I apologize here for the run on sentence) is really surprising. |
You are right but that implies that both VTech admissions and TJ college counseling should look into the application barriers they have in the way of allowing busy students to take advantage of VTech. I.e
The coalition app should not be the only way VTech accepts applications but they should add the common app as another pathway. |
Many TJ kids practically "beg" the top 15% kids not to apply to UVA because vast majority of them will very likely just end up getting accepted and not matriculating at UVA. Other TJ kids actually frown upon top 10% kids applying to UVA thinking they just take the limited (possibly quota) admission slots. My TJ kid decided not to apply to UVA since he knew he was probably not going to attend UVA. |
TJ is a STEM-oriented school. UVA has never really been considered a STEM powerhouse. |
Until you get to the workforce and actually have to interact with managers and colleagues (and investors if you create a start up). Soft skills matter a lot. |
Source? |
NP. Start with Polaris List. Best admissions results public or private. https://www.polarislist.com/ |
^^. plus, you now have 90% of the list. Of the remainder, a few kids always end up at quirky places, like Music conservatories, SCAD or Parsons, St, Johns or Reed. A few will be scattered throughout SLACs, and it’s just a lot of effort to pull 30-40 of them off Naviance to get 6 kids. Some always end up in Canada, Asia and/or Europe. A few will be at other big state Us.
But what other school could possibly pull off a list like this? Then add in almost no hooks for legacy, athletics, or URM. You may love to hate TJ. But the kids worked hard for great results. Which is something we are all supposed to support. |
In fact, 68% of the TJ graduates (Asian Americans) have to overcome active bias against them on top of not having legacy, URM, athletic preferences to gain admissions to almost all of the top 25 schools (only school said to be neutral and objective is Caltech). Even UCs have an admission system that is supposedly not using affirmative actions had admissions readers admit that UCs also favor blacks and Hispanics over Asians in admissions "unofficially". |
Big drop in enrolled count for UVA in 2019, though. It could be what you say, those who are admitted are likely to go elsewhere. Difficult to say. |
What the numbers prove is, unless you are at the TOP of TJ, it will not help you in college admissions. Sure, the top 50% get into UVA, but, the top 50% would certainly be in the top 10% of the base school which also gets into UVA.
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UVA isn’t the only great school in the world. Or even VA. It will always have a soft TJ quota. And a soft McLean quota. And a soft noVA quota. Hopefully Ead means kids who really want it but are slightly lower ranked get a look. But, there are other great schools out there. Is a T10 Engineering school a bad college outcome? Chicago? Williams? NYU? Grinnell? Tufts? A UC? CWRU? Pitt with a ton of merit? I’m not seeing a lot of weak links in this list. |
But did TJ help these kids get into those schools? That is what is unknown. I know at the better base schools, if you look at the top 20% of the students, the college admissions are comparable to TJ. It is not TJ that gets kids into good schools, but the fact that only top kids go to TJ. |